Executive Director of the Home of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) and environmentalist, Nimmo Bassey has bemoaned the pollution levels in the Niger Delta, advocating for urgent action on the environment, to build a resilient future.
Bassey stated this while speaking at the Niger Delta Climate conference held in Port Harcourt, Rivers State on Wednesday.
The conference had as its theme: “Building a resilient future: Climate action & community empowerment”.
He said that “when we speak of building a resilient future, we have to look at the environment in which we live and examine the state of that environment.
“What are the living conditions for humans and other beings that we share the planet with?
“The Niger Delta is a deeply polluted environment, a deeply degraded territory, one of the worst polluted places on the planet.
“Research has confirmed this sad reality. The environmental assessment of Ogoni land issued by the United Nations Environment Programme in 2021, clearly shows the desperate pollution of Ogoni land, the land, the water, and the air.
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“In some places, hydrocarbons have penetrated the soil up to five meters. By the time the cleanup started, pollution had sunk as deep as 10 meters,” Bassey said.
He recalled that in 2023, the Bayelsa State Oil and Environment Commission issued a report entitled: “An environmental genocide, counting the human and environmental cost of oil in Bayelsa, Nigeria.”
“Now, when we speak of environmental genocide, we have to understand this by looking at what genocide itself means. Genocide is an intentional attack and annihilation of a people; ethnic cleansing.
“An environmental genocide can also be termed ecocide. It happens when there’s an intentional and persistent destruction of a particular environment, as has been the case of the Niger Delta over the last 68 years,” Bassey said.
According to him, the Niger Delta is a territory that the inhabitants are the living dead due to horrific environmental degradation.
He said that Bayelsa State has 40 percent of its mangrove forests destroyed, while 1.5 million barrels of crude oil are spilled per capita.
Bassey explained that about 14 million cubic meters of natural gas is flared every day at 17 facilities in Bayelsa State alone, releasing toxic elements into the air and causing cancers, breathing illnesses, and acid rain.
He further noted that oil-related contaminants, such as chromium, are present in groundwater at a level 1,000 times beyond the World Health Organization (WHO) limit, and then shockingly, total petroleum hydrocarbons exceed safe levels by a factor of 1 million.
